A Diary of Long Days

notes on life unfolding

Paul Henry ca. 1895

It was a long Monday when a black hole opened up on Paradise Lane. My house is oblivion. Tuesday, and I am a voyager in my bath. It is a vessel to take me out of this place, with its deep sides and swooping low. I hide inside of it and wish the world away, pinching my nose and holding my breath. Eyes wide open watching the ceiling wilt behind the glass curtain. The water softens everything, it is everywhere, I am buried in it but alive. I listen to the thumping of a heart behind my chest, working away without my ask, willing itself to survive despite me being sick of it. I have fed and watered it such poison for months, hoping it will slow it, but still it beats. On and on and on and on. The longer I hold my breath the shorter and softer the beating becomes, the distance between its punching growing further. I wonder if it will ever grow far enough for it to pull itself away from me, or me it. How long does it take to move out of your own body? Are we ever really living in it?

It is no use, this holding, this desperate action to find a silence. I wonder if I should let go, open my mouth and let the water flood in and fill me up, tend to me like an unloved plant being paid some attention. There’s no point. I won’t let it in, I am good at that, not letting things in. Instead, I hurl myself forwards and out of the water, brushing my hands across my face and smoothing the hair back along my scalp, tidying myself up so as to be presentable again. There’s no feeling to the air, no taste, nothing. It is as numb as it was before I submerged, possibly even number, now polluted with failure. I inhale and exhale but feel unchanged.

I step out of the bath and into the water that has spilled over and onto the floor, my foot makes a soft landing and small ripples echo, pushing any reflection away from me. Looking down, I can’t see myself, not fully. The shape of my years are being divided and pulled into a distance where the water ends. There I am, split apart, being moved away from anything whole. One foot moving ahead of the other into the water as though I am stepping out onto shore, living, but not alive. With no real direction I find myself on the bed, naked and hot, still wet and drying in the air. The window is open and I can hear people moving and doing things. I find my body with my hands and feel it, touching myself into boredom and so pick up the clothes from the floor and put them on. Dressed for going downstairs.

‘Leaving the bath’ by Edgar Degas. 1879

I am distracted lately. Life unfolds as it does, with hours to fill. Some hours are spent on calls to people I can’t reach. Some are spent not answering and unavailable. There’s an hour at my dogs side walking the same route we have done thousands of times before, and still he wants to go. How can I be more like this dog, so stupid and naive and open to the world in front of him. How can I love my days like he does? There are minutes inside of an hour looking at myself naked in the mirror, the red bites on my arms, the hair around my cock getting slightly overgrown, the roughness of my knees from all the praying, willing and begging. I am inside the mirror more than I am in front of it. Then, hours spent inside my head spinning wildly and ricocheting off the walls. Tuesday is nearly as long as Monday.

A fledgling gull now off the roof sits among the wildflowers under my kitchen window. My neighbours cat Bert spends his hours leaping onto the young flightless thing, clawing its way across its soft feathery body. I lean at the window watching it, with salmon in my fridge, feeling no desire to help. I am as numb as I was stood at the side of James Street watching another fledgling roll what it could of itself around the road, painting it with a bright new red, so unseen in this world until now. It was dying and I watched without feelings, just questions.

I haven’t been held in years, not properly. Attempts to hold myself have mostly failed. There was a pale pink night under the lighthouse with Dáithí, naked and cold in the sea, pushed against the rock and wrapped around each other. But nights have a funny habit of ending, whilst days take their time, like long Monday’s with black holes. Just one week ago I was spending my nights in days that didn’t end, under a midnight sun in the arctic circle, holding myself in the world as it turns.

I haven’t been seen in decades, not since I was born. When I was shiny, new and unaffected, when I was able and willing and not yet living, just alive. I forget what it’s like to be found by someone and to be understood, for them to hold me in a space and make it real, and to be living with them and alive on a Tuesday in July.

James McNeil Whistler, 1887

Wednesday is short and steady, the fledgling made it through the night. It sits at my window looking at nothing and everything. I reach into my fridge, take the salmon and hold my arm out of the window like a kid in the backseat of a car heading down the motorway, waving the salmon around. One bite for the fledgling and one bite for me. We sit and eat, half of the packet now gone. Both of us flightless, his wings not yet full and mine clipped and stowed. We sit together, eating, alive and with half a day left until tomorrow.

And then, tonic, a fever tree of feelings. A constellation of pixels. A soft power, delicate, like a breeze through a meadow. Folding and moving and hot. So very there just not quite in my hands, but in a distance I want to go towards. There’s a life somewhere, I know it. I have had it spoken to me. One that I could live within if I make it far enough, and, if these days would start to end.

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